How Youth Activists are Using Civil Rights Frameworks to Advance a Radical Vision for Equality on College Campuses
Session Type(s): Panel
Starts: Saturday, Jul. 16 2:30 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Saturday, Jul. 16 3:45 PM (Eastern)
Think civil rights laws are gathering dust on the shelf? Think again! A new generation of youth activists are creatively using civil rights frameworks and legal tools to advance a radical, intersectional vision of equality, safety and justice on campus. Disability justice advocates are using Title II to fight for disabled students, and anti-rape advocates are using civil rights laws to strengthen non-carceral responses to sexual violence. Trans youth fight for safety and access under Title IX as students of color use Title VI to combat racial discrimination on campus and draw on the anti-segregation movement to advance educational access for undocumented youth. Join us to discuss the power and possibility of these bold strategies.
Moderator
Zoe Ridolfi-Starr
Zoe is the Deputy Director at Know Your IX, a survivor-run, student driven organization working to end gender-based violence on college campuses. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, she founded the activist group No Red Tape and was the lead complainant in a prominent Title IX complaint against her school. She has also led legislative advocacy efforts on city, state, and federal levels to strengthen campus policies and reduce reliance on the criminal justice system.
Zoe grew up in a queer family in the Bay Area, and now lives and works in Harlem. As a queer woman and a survivor of sexual violence survivor herself, she is committed to centering the voices of survivors and people of marginalized identities in anti-violence work, and building community-based solutions to sexual violence that do not rely on inherently violent institutions like prisons. She also works on abortion access, juvenile justice, and prison resistance.
Other sessions: Ending Campus Rape: How Survivors are Creating a Winning National Movement
Panelists
Lydia Brown
Lydia X. Z. Brown is a genderqueer east asian autistic activist, writer, and speaker whose work has largely focused on violence against multiply-marginalized disabled people, especially institutionalization, incarceration, and policing. They have worked to advance transformative change through organizing in the streets, writing legislation, conducting anti-ableism workshops, testifying at regulatory and policy hearings, and disrupting institutional complacency everywhere from the academy to state agencies and the nonprofit-industrial complex. Lydia is a 2016 Holley Law Fellow at the National LGBTQ Task Force. Lydia is also TASH New England co-president, Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council chairperson, and an Autism Women’s Network board member. Lydia is the lead editor of All the Weight of Our Dreams, an anthology by autistic people of color. Their work has been featured in various publications, including Criptiques, Torture in Healthcare Settings, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, Tikkun, Black Girl Dangerous, hardboiled magazine, POOR Magazine, and the Washington Post.
Other sessions: Authentically Engaging with Trans* Leadership in Progressive Organizing
Andy Kim
Andy Kim (he/him/his) is a native of Athens, GA, a child of Korean immigrants, and the co-founder and past member of “Freedom at Emory,” a student-led advocacy group for undocumented students at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. He led a successful initiative that provided need-based financial aid and campus resources for DACAmented students at Emory with Freedom at Emory and Freedom University, an underground freedom school that provides college-level classes for undocumented students. He also served as a staff member for Freedom University and supported their direct actions against the Georgia Board of Regents and their policies, which ban undocumented students from enrolling in and receiving in-state tuition at Georgia’s public universities. Currently, Andy is an Emerson National Hunger Fellow in Washington, DC working on immigrant and labor rights issues at Farmworker Justice. Andy will begin a PhD program in anthropology at Northwestern University in the fall.
Shane Windmeyer
Shane L. Windmeyer, M.S., Ed. is a best-selling author, LGBTQ campus pioneer and civil rights champion. He is founder and executive director of Campus Pride, the leading national LGBTQ organization for student leaders and campus organizations working to build future leaders and create safer campus communities.
Windmeyer was raised on a farm in Hiawatha, Kansas and was born as Shane Mendez. Windmeyer is part of the Iowa Tribe. His family is mixed race Mexican, American Indian, and Irish. Windmeyer attended Emporia State University as a first generation college student and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and then attended Indiana University where he received his Master’s degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs. He lives in Charlotte, NC with his husband Thomas Feldman. They were legally married in 2015 after twenty years of being together.